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This book is a great read for anyone searching for their life's mission.

Book Name: Mastery

Author: Robert Greene

Originally Published: 2012

Personal Rating: 10/10

🧠 What the book is about:

It challenges you to discover and pursue your life’s task — your mission. It urges you to follow your own voice, rather than conforming to the expectations of your social environment.

It pushes you to be the best version of yourself. You are unique, and no one can be better at being you than you. Stop acting to please the expectations of others.

You’re meant to do what you believe you are called to do, not what your parents, friends, or peers expect of you. Do what you love because you’re passionate about it, not for an specific outcome.

🚀 My thoughts?

For someone like me, who isn’t an experienced reader, it was a challenging read as it’s both dense and long — it took me a while to finish. Robert Greene does deep research and shares numerous stories about historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Carl Jung, and many others who pursued their inner calling and succeeded. He also illustrates how, despite the difficulties of their journeys, they kept following their hearts and ultimately found success. Not because they were chasing an outcome, but because they were passionate about what they did, regardless of the result.

✍🏻 My top quotes/ideas:

• Your mission is to discover your Life’s Task, but when you conform to social norms, you will listen more to others than to your own voice. You may choose a career path based on what peers and parents tell you, or on what seems lucrative. If you lose contact with your inner calling, you can have some success in life, but eventually your lack of true desire catches up with you. Your work becomes mechanical. You come to live for leisure and immediate pleasures.
• You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task - what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live. In childhood this force was clear to you. It directed you toward activities and subjects that fit your natural inclinations, that sparked a curiosity that was deep and primal. In the intervening years, the force tends to fade in and out as you listen more to parents and peers, to the daily anxieties that wear away at you. This can be the source of your unhappiness - your lack of connection to who you are and what makes you unique. The first move toward mastery is always inward-learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the career path and everything else will fall into place. It is never too late to start the process.
• At your birth, a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. Your Life’s Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. What weakens this force, what makes you not feel it or even doubt its existence, is the degree to which you have succumbed to another force in life - social pressures to conform. You want to fit into a group. This can set you off in a very dangerous path. You end up choosing a career that does not really suit you. You come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes outside your work.
• Some people never become who they are; they stop trusting in themselves; they conform to the taste of others, and they end up wearing a mask that hides their true nature. If you allow yourself to learn- who you really are by paying attention to that voice and force within you, then you can become what you were fated to become - an individual, a Master.
• You are not tied to a particular position; your loyalty is not to a career or a company. You are committed to your Life’s Task, to giving its full expression. It is up to you to find it and guide it correctly. It is not up to others to protect you or help you. You are on your own.
• The greatest mistake you can make when you start is to imagine that you have to get attention, impress people, and prove yourself. Any positive attention you receive is deceptive. If you impress people in these first months, it should be because of the seriousness of your desire to learn, not because you are trying to rise to the top before you are ready.
• The initial stages of learning a skill invariably involve tedium. Yet rather than avoiding this inevitable tedium, you must accept and embrace it. The pain and boredom we experience in the initial stage of learning a skill toughens our minds. Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction? In any event, you must meet any boredom head-on and not try to avoid or repress it. Throughout your life you will encounter tedious situations, and you must cultivate the ability to handle them with discipline.
• This process cannot occur if you are constantly distracted, moving from one task to another. In such a case, the neural pathways dedicated to this skill never get established; what you learn is too tenuous to remain rooted in the brain. It is better to dedicate two or three hours of intense focus to a skill than to spend eight hours of diffused concentration on it. You want to be as immediately present to what you are doing as possible.
• Your sense of pleasure becomes redefined. What offers immediate pleasure comes to seem like a distraction, an empty entertainment to help pass the time. Real pleasure comes from overcoming challenges, feeling confidence in your abilities, gaining fluency in skills, and experiencing the power this brings. You develop patience. Boredom no longer signals the need for distraction, but rather the need for new challenges to conquer.
• What is important when you are young, is to train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy.
• The active mode is a critical component. As you gain skill and confidence, you must take the move to a more active mode of experimentation. This could mean initiating a project of some sort, doing work that exposes you to the criticism of peers or even the public - often you must force yourself to initiate such actions or experiments before you think you are ready. The point of this is to gauge your progress and whether there are still gaps in your knowledge. You are observing yourself in action and seeing how you respond to the judgements of others. Can you take criticism and use it constructively?
• You must value learning above everything else. It is a simple law of human psychology that your thoughts will tend to revolve around what you value most. If it is money, you will choose a place that offers the biggest pay check. You will be focused on the need to please and impress the right people. It will be too costly for you to make mistakes and learn from them, so you will develop a cautious and conservative approach. You will become addicted to the fat pay check and it will determine where you go, how you think, and what you do. Eventually, time will catch up with you, and the fall will be painful.
• First, it is essential that you begin with one skill that you can master, and that serves as a foundation for acquiring other skills. You must avoid at all cost the idea that you can manage learning several skills at a time. You need to develop your powers of concentration, and understand that trying to multitask will be the death of the process.
• By nature, we humans shrink from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult, but when it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient. Assuming your practice proceed at a steady level, over days and weeks, certain elements of the skill become hardwired. Slowly, the entire skills becomes internalized, part of your nervous system. The mind is no longer mired in the details, but can see the larger picture. The only real impediment to this is yourself and your emotions - boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions - they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters. What you can do is have faith in the process. The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle. The panic disappears after repeated exposure. The frustration is a sign of progress - a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice.
• At the beginning, you must try to revert to a childlike feeling of inferiority - the feeling that others know much more than you and that you are dependent upon them to learn. You are full of curiosity. Assuming this sensation of inferiority, your mind will open up and you will have a hunger to learn. This position is of course only temporary.
• People who do not practice and learn new skills never gain proper sense of proportion or self-criticism. They think they can achieve anything without effort and have little contact with reality. Trying something over and over again grounds you in reality, making you deeply aware of your inadequacies and of what you can accomplish with more work and effort.
• To attain Mastery, you must adopt Resistance Practice. You go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice.
• Those who have researched the subject repeatedly come up with the number of 10,000 hours. This seems to be the amount of quality practice time that is needed for someone to reach a high level of a skill and it applies to composers, chess players, writers, and athletes; it generally adds up to seven to ten years of sustained, solid practice.

🎯 Other interesting ideas from the book:

• People get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in life.
• Work is often seen as a means for making money so we can enjoy that second life that we lead. This is a depressing attitude, because in the end we spend a substantial part of our life at work. If we experience this time as something to get through on the way to real pleasure, then our hours at work represent a tragic waste of the short time we have to live.
• A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons - money, fame, attention and so on.
• In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it.
• The game you want to play is different: to instead find a niche in the ecology that you can dominate. It is never a simple process to find such a niche. It requires patience and a particular strategy.
• You don’t want to abandon the skills and experience that you have gained, but to find a new way to apply them.
• When you are faced with deficiencies instead of strengths and inclinations, this is the strategy you must assume: ignore your weaknesses and resist the temptation to be more like others. Instead, direct yourself toward the small things that you are good at. Do not dream or make grand plans for the future, but instead concentrate on becoming proficient at these simple and immediate skills. This will bring you confidence and become a base from which you can expand to other pursuits. Proceeding in this way, step by step, you will hit upon your Life’s Task.
• To follow precisely the lead of others or advice from a book is self-defeating.
• The goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character.
• You enter a career as an outsider. You are naïve and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience. Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world represented by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatience and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end, you will master yourself and all your weaknesses.
• You must choose place of work and positions that offer the greatest possibilities for learning. Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity, and is what will pay you dividends for decades to come. You do not choose apprenticeships that seem easy and comfortable.
• As much as possible, you want to reduce theses skills to something simple and essential - the core of what you need to get good at, skills that can be practiced.
• The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same.
• The great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them - those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds, and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.
• What separates Masters from others is often something surprisingly simple. Whenever we learn a new skill, we frequently reach a point of frustration - what we are learning seems beyond our capabilities. Giving in to these feelings, we unconsciously quit on ourselves before we actually give up.
• You will need mentors whose authority you recognize and to whom you submit. Your admission of need does not say anything essential about you, but only about your temporary condition of weakness, which your mentor will help you overcome. Mentors do not give a shortcut, but they streamline the process. If your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as contemporary mentors. In such case, you will want to convert such books and writers into living mentors as much as possible. You personalize their voice, interact with the material, taking notes or writing in the margins, You analyze what they write and try to make it come alive
• “I am a composer… I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me” - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself” - Leonardo Da Vinci

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